Episode Review: "Between Dusk and Dawn" - Season 9 Episode 13 · 4:54pm Jun 23rd, 2019

Fans love Celestia and Luna, despite, or perhaps even because of, how little they actually get to do in the show. It’s been a running joke in the fandom for eight years now how not only do the Princess never do anything helpful in the thick of action, but that they are almost invariably bested easily despite their powers.
Here, we have yet another episode concept that seems tailor-made for hardcore fans: Celestia and Luna having a vacation where they can try all the things royal duties normally keep them from. In essence, it’s a Slice of Life episode with the Royal Sisters. The closest to a Royal Sister episode we had before was A Royal Problem, which doesn’t fully qualify due to still nominally having Starlight Glimmer as its main character. Not only that, but this episode also promises to further the arc teased at the season’s start, giving Twilight and co. some practice being rulers while they’re away, furthering their path to taking over when the Royal Sisters retire come the season’s end. So with all that importance on its back, how did the episode fare?

…I’m lost for words. There hasn’t been an episode this flat-out weird in ages, and not always to its benefit either. More so then any episode in quite some time, this one tries to do everything under the sun that it possibly can – there is enough incident here, crudely wedged together, for two separate episodes, ideally by giving the A-plot and B-plot their own separate episodes that tie into one another, much like ‘Just for Sidekicks’ and ‘Games Ponies Play’ did. Frankly, I’m not even sure how to go about tackling this episode. Bear with me as I try.

After an intriguing opening minute showing the Mane 7 stopping a giant tortoise Fluttershy knows from eating the Apples’ trees (which setups up a weird subplot and thread that is never again relevant baring a single gag four minutes before the end), Celestia and Luna show up to wrap up the situation, hamming up that they now love being in the thick of the action. Following a montage of the Royal Sisters helping out with trivial things, and the Mane 7 wondering what the hay is going on, they come clean: ever since they and Star Swirl held back the Everfree Forest during the season Premiere, they acquired a thirst for doing things beyond ordinary Princess duties. Pinkie suggests they instead do a bucket-list vacation, with Twilight and the others filling in while they’re gone, as practice for taking over come their retirement. Trouble is, that entails a ‘Royal Swanifying Ceremony’ in this case, alongside racing and lowering the sun and moon in their absence.

One obvious issue with the episode, it being far too compressed, becomes apparent when you consider that it takes 8 minutes to set up all those pieces, of a 21-minute runtime when you shifts out the title song and credits. If the episode has to fit all this in, the best way would have been with all this in a 3-minute cold opening, perhaps with the Royal Sisters simply asking them to fill in while they take a break. Apart from giving us an extra five minutes, it would also save us from a tonally discordant first act. The effect this has on the remaining 13 minutes is that it achieves momentum, but not coherence, with everything making sense but also being kind of scattershot.

Of those 13 minutes, the Luna and Celestia material is enjoyable, using a simple structure of Celestia wanting thrills and Luna wanting relaxation, them attempting to alternate, coming to butt heads and then making up, and then spicing that up with all manner of verbal and visual gags, many of which utilize either outrageously unnatural facial expressions or perfectly delivered dialogue from Nicole Oliver or Tabitha St. Germain. This is where it is most apparent that we have a guest writer, as this episode has a certain je ne sais quoi quite unlike any other episode. More on that in a bit.

Meanwhile, the episode frequently checks back in on Twilight and the others, and it dies there. It’s clear guest writer Gail Simone either didn’t effectively research, or was not effectively told by the showrunners, what this part of the seasonal arc entails – while it does hit the basic rhythm of “Twilight learning that being a leader means delegating to get things done in time”, it’s presented in a compressed manner that siphons out all but the easiest gags and writing invention. And while it doesn’t rely on Twilight freakouts – there is but two very mild ones that last but a sentence and barely make themselves known – it instead resuscitates the Applebuck Season trope of not reaching out for help (in this case, beyond the Mane 7) despite others offering it, and passes it to Twilight. Twilight not knowing to effectively delegate is especially questionable given she delegates effectively during the cold opening with the tortoise. Couple that with it all being about a wacky event regarding swans executed straight, which heavily cheapens its contributions to a seasonal arc starting to grey around the edges from underuse by now, and even though the episode only spends 4 minutes here, they’re deathly dull.

Ah, but the Celestia and Luna material, now that’s fascinating! Gail Simone has written hard-edged comics before, most notably Birds of Prey. Adult material like that is a weird fit for My Little Pony, even if that offbeat approach is exactly why Simone was hired here. And this wedge between a more offbeat, less sentimental take on the material, and the typical FiM approach, leads to an episode that is basically at war with itself. This is unsettling, but in a much more colorful and complicated way then a normally poorly written episode. What this leaves us with is a peculiar rhythm as Celestia and Luna gradually grate on each others’ nerves with their different preferences, though it’s all hindered by finishing with a moral the characters already knew at the start and had merely forgotten. The episode doesn’t even consider the moral instead being ‘it’s okay to go off and do your own thing for a bit”.

Luna and Celestia have had so little “non-serious” moments throughout the series that it’s almost easy to overlook that their characterization here is decidedly spotty in places, though you don’t notice this during the experience of the episode itself, what with the tone and structural weirdness dominating one’s impression. Despite using slight-of-hand via a solid song to spring it on us, the conflict of them butting heads comes from nowhere, this being the main consequence of the compressed script. And while using a song to transition like that has worked very well for the show in the past, it doesn’t quite here, at least after the fact.

The end result of this monstrosity is an episode that is enjoyable in the moment but leaves a borderline-incomprehensible impression once it has wrapped, not helped by the quality frequently veering back and forth between cloud-breaking highs and trench-deep lows. I still find ‘A Royal Problem’ quite an enjoyable episode because it handles its offbeat concept well enough. Simone was hired here to make an episode as far afield from MLP as was possible that Hasbro would still sign off on, and that’s what we got. Despite ‘Slice of Life’ existing, this is the flat-out weirdest episode in FiM’s whole run – this is both its great triumph and ultimately the reason it’s hard to care about the end result all that much.

But hey, the 66-minute Rainbow Roadtrip special is next week, animated in the Movie style (albeit on a tv schedule) by Hasbro-acquired Irish animation Studio Boulder Media. I'm rooting heavily for it, because you gotta support the home troops. Though I'd be rooting anyway, of course.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS
- Were the show managed in a less-freelance-heavy way with how the writers actually write their scripts, it would have been possible to have the plots split up just like ‘Just For Sidekicks’ and ‘Games Ponies Play’, with the first episode focusing on the Mane 7 managing a task that isn’t stupidly absurd at the palace, while episode B got to focus on Celestia and Luna instead. Such a take would have been far less weird then what we got, but all the better for it – I enjoy ‘Just For Sidekicks’ and ‘Games Ponies Play’ more then most, and their connected structure is not least among the reason why.
- Capper cameos during the song! He still seems to be a barely-altered Toom Boom rig, not looking quite in place as much as the normal Flash character rigs surrounding him.
- Despite Kazumi Evans singing for Luna back in Twilight’s Kingdom (a decision supposedly made independent of Evans also singing in place of St. Germain for Rarity), she is instead voiced by Aloma Steele here, who, being frank, doesn’t vocally sound similar to Luna, to a much greater level of distraction then with Rarity.
- The Fancy Pants here bears almost no resemblance to the Fancy Pants from ‘Sweet and Elite’, far more of a snob in how he instructs others to have things sorted out, then the cool and well-composed pony who encourages others to be the best they can he was before. Yet another sign of a guest writer thrust on an episode they shouldn’t have been. He’s handled better once he explains the Princesses don’t do everything by themselves, but by then it’s too little, too late.